Letters to the Editor, Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2017

Today at 9:30 a.m. at the Fort Myers courthouse, the community and the NAACP will decry the times when blacks were used as personal property.

While the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has recently strengthened national calls for removal of Confederate statues, James Muwakkil, leader of the Lee County NAACP, has been decrying the picture of Robert E. Lee since 2007, when Lee County commissioners refused to post a portrait of President Abraham Lincoln next to Lee's portrait. Again, in a 2013 letter to commissioners, Muwakkil described Lee’s portrait in the County Commission meeting room as symbolizing racism and divisiveness: Dividing, rather than uniting, the county.

Per the Southern Poverty Law Center, most of the 1,500 public Confederate symbols were built during the early decades of the Jim Crow era or in reaction to the civil rights movement, not after the Civil War, so it’s clear to me that they were erected to intimidate those seeking social progress and justice.

Ridding the building of the homage to ethnic domination is essential. Equally, if not more important, is the expansion of such daily anti-racism work as restoring ex-felons' voting rights, fighting for clean water -- free of toxic chemicals -- in black neighborhoods and pushing for redistricting in order to seat people of color on the Lee County School Board.

The polemical visage of the inarguably brutal slave owner in the commission room is a slap in the face to slaves’ descendants and a repugnant reminder to all those who reject white supremacy. The Germans take responsibility for Nazism by erecting reminders of the suffering under Adolf Hitler, rather than glorifying his name.

We keep hearing from various public officials how our lives will change as the county's demographics continue to grow. This simple truth is going to require more and more cooperation and collaboration between Collier County commissioners and the Naples City Council. The county needs the city's tax base and the city expects its interests to be addressed in return. This should be a symbiotic relationship. We need each other if we are going to maintain our quality of life as we move into the future and the future is now!

One topic keeps coming up over and over again: downtown parking. The city is considering another massive parking garage in a residential neighborhood. I believe that the City Council is going to have to get real about parking. The county is on the right track by looking for ways to improve how their shuttle system works. In the words of the Tourist Development Council, "The purpose of the shuttle is to take pressure off the parking lots at two of the county's busiest beaches, while also reducing traffic on roads to and from the coast."

The city issued 310 event permits with 50 of them requiring city road closures. That's a lot of traffic and it's time for the city to join with the county and make the shuttle program efficient and effective. Shuttles have worked very well before. While NCH Healthcare System was building its parking garage, employees were shuttled from off-site for a year and a half.

Why can't we do that for people who work downtown and for special events? This would take a lot of stress away for city residents and would be a minor inconvenience to our visitors and event participants.

Ronald Soulard, Naples

Right ‘wrongheadedness’

This is a message to a poorly informed liberal who recently authored “Southerners” in the Naples Florida Weekly.

Roger Williams, slavery has been practiced worldwide since the beginning of time and will continue as long as there are benefits to be gained at acceptable prices in places where allowed. It's called supply and demand (notice "supply" precedes "demand"). Slave traders create and perpetuate this practice much like the illicit drug traders who also operate around the world.

It is ludicrous that the liberals (Democrats) who most strongly benefited from and supported slavery and segregation in this country now have the unmitigated audacity to condemn the practice while simultaneously supporting the recreational use of illicit drugs. This gives new meaning to the terms "wrongheadedness" and "hypocrisy."

Liberals formulated and perpetuated the practice of segregation (Southern Democrats) and its enforcement with the Ku Klux Klan (remember Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd and his predecessors), much as they did the practice of socialism (remember Hitler and national socialism/Nazism and Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro and communism), and now blame conservatives (Republicans) of being "racist,", "Nazis", etc. It's like the brat who broke the window with a rock and then blamed the owner of the home.

This is the narrative which is causing the accelerated destruction of the Democratic Party and reminds me of a sign I have: "Ignorance can be corrected but stupidity lives forever." All the "commucrats" have to do to ensure a second term for President Donald Trump is to continue their current behaviors.

All the best, Mr. Williams. I know you thrive on the naive, misguided and convoluted words that you write, but they will continue to have little meaning and less support unless you do your homework and right your wrongheadedness.

Howard Ibele, Naples

A kind, caring customer

On Aug. 21, my husband fell in an Arby's parking lot. A very kind and caring customer came to our aid. It appeared my husband needed stitches on his face. The gentleman called 911 and stayed with us until the ambulance took my husband to the hospital.

Unfortunately, I neglected to ask his name although I thanked him and shook his hand. I hope he sees this letter and knows how much we appreciated his kindnesses. He was truly our savior and I am so grateful.

Muriel Dietel, Naples

No public funds for stadium

What was the question to which the proposed regional sports stadium was the answer?

Was it, create more tourism, through periodic events, which hopefully would bring people to motels, Airbnbs and restaurants? Is that the tourism vision for Collier County? More short-term tourists?

Perhaps to encourage more business? Then why, instead of perks, is our county supplying all of the money, even raising the hotel bed tax 1 cent to help pay for the structure, hoping eventually to attract the third-party sports and business interests envisioned (a group, by the way, that will have no money in the game, but brings expertise)? If this passes, Collier County is going head-on into the sports business, one that will not pay any future taxes, because of the park designation.

As a taxpayer, it looks to me as if our commissioners will be giving the store away to make this complex work financially. This is not even taking into consideration the future maintenance fees of the 3,500-seat stadium and grounds for which they will be responsible, as long as the structure lasts.

I hope our commissioners have taken a long look at this $100 million proposal over the summer and this month will vote “no” on this proposition and let the sports and business interests raise their own money, while Collier County commissioners get back to the business of running our county and managing our growth.

Maureen Trerice, Naples

Manufactured crisis

Most rational people agree that white supremacists are atrocious. While they do exist, their scant numbers, thankfully, have pushed them to the periphery of American society.

In fact, even though I went to college in the South during the 1960s, and my family was originally from New Orleans and I am a conservative, not surprisingly, I’ve never met a white supremacist. As best as can be measured, they have no impact on American life. They have, however, recently become front and center in the public mindset.

Their rise to national notoriety and, therefore, prominence has been accomplished by the deliberate actions of the left-leaning media colluding with the Democrats' intent to divide and conquer. Leftists must have been thrilled to hear that white supremacists would be rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia, around a statue of Robert E. Lee (the general, not the sports commentator).

The left recognized, however, that this originally minuscule rally would not have been sufficient to generate the headlines it craved. To maximize the mayhem, they proceeded to engineer a confrontation, with its attendant violence, by mobilizing a large number of the antifa (anti-fascists) who could and would produce chaos on call.

Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff in the President Barack Obama White House, once explained the left’s general approach, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” In the case of Charlottesville, they carried that a step farther; the crisis had to be, and was, manufactured.

America is now immersed in a hysterical orgy of desecrating public monuments. If the left keeps elevating marginal anomalies to being descriptive of American reality, there is no way of determining where this mob frenzy and insanity will end.